I am dumbfounded that uBlock Origin, arguably the single most important extension in modern web browsing, and one that makes millions of lives easier by making their web experience bearable at all, all of this depends on one single person, working for free.
Now there's also the list maintainers, who also work for free. Still makes you wonder about how the world works. There's probably many other similar instances. In any case, I think these people deserve more recognition than they currently do and we shouldn't take anything they do for granted.
We should also thank Firefox for having adblockers at the time when Chrome was released. Otherwise Google wouldn't have felt the need to add an adblocker extension API in the first place.
Having adblocker extensions was one of the things that allowed Google to get Firefox users to switch at the time.
Ever wonder why Mobile Chrome doesn't have extensions or adblockers? Because it didn't have to compete with Firefox to gain marketshare.
From a selfish POV isn't it better as an adblock user that other users don't use adblock? Then they unwittingly subsidize your pleasant ad free experience.
I get what you mean, but I wish more people used Adblock so that more sites would be forced to switch to contextual non-surveillance advertising. I'd get to support sites more while maintaining privacy.
As more people switched to contextual ads, the ecosystem for it would also improve and rates would hopefully increase (for smaller sites).
Because adblockers depend on things coming from 3rd party ad servers doing instant auctions for ads based on user profiles. They do it client side because the latencies involved vs doing it server side are far less.
With non-surveliance based ads, they can make the ads completely indistinguishable from normal content in their CMS and make it look like first party content and server side based. And since the user info will be minimal beyond an IP, it will mostly be content based vs. user based. They can even do things like podcasts & youtubes videos do with sponsorships that come with the content.
They don't do it because it doesn't make as much money as the current status quo and would require more work to integrate if it was offered.
From a selfish point of view, I care more about the benefits to me brought by Firefox having a bigger market share and Mozilla having more influence on the development of the web, than the benefits brought to me by other people looking at ads.
I can second this. Along with "Popup Blocker (strict)" and "HTTPS Everywhere", the web is a lot less annoying. But Firefox on Android has some basic issues: the tabs go dead/unresponsive on some JS heavy websites.
Why do you need a strict popup blocker? I honestly can't remember the last time I got a popup ad, but there are useful popups every once in a while (oauth logins, etc). It seems more annoying than anything.
I found Firefox + uBlock almost unusable on my Pixel 2XL and use Brave. But I'm glad the options exist at all... I just wish more hardware was more open at Manufacturer End of Live (when they stop updating). So that third parties could continue support better. There's definitely a need for right to repair laws at this point.
Was probably close to launch, almost 2 years ago now... I've been pretty happy with Brave overall, and also found Firefox UI a little frustrating by comparison so didn't worry too much to retry since.
Could very well be better now... I've tended to try FF on most platforms about once a year as my main browser. I do tend to test in it for dev though. My current app doesn't really have a mobile target (mainly deals with scanned images, so desktop is primary).
FWIW, coming from Chrome, the Firefox mobile UI was very frustrating to me also for about two weeks 'til I got used to it. Now it feels familiar and seamless.
Thanks for reminding me about this. I kept thinking "Google Chrome on Android is unbearable because of all the ads", and your post reminded me I could do something about it. Just installed Firefox + muBlock Origin. Thanks!
I've been using Firefox mobile for years and really love it. It's always been a vastly better experience than Chrome. I usually use DNS based adblockers on my phone though; AdAway+rooting via magisk.
Without rooting, you can use the VPN blocking provided by AdGuard. It has some paid features (like ad blocking in apps), which it sometimes reminds about, but otherwise I am happy to use both Chrome and Firefox for Android without advertisements.
Gesture tab switching (swiping on the top bar) is the killer feature for me. I use Firefox but with great sacrifice, because swiping is so ingrained in my workflow.
I really want to switch for this reason, but I've naively come to rely on Chrome's saved passwords feature. What I really need is a tool to migrate my saved passwords from Google to Firefox or some other service.
lastpass has a lot of import / export options as far as I remember, so that might be a good place to start... but once you get them imported you should be able to export them to another service easily enough.
ive moved to bitwarden a few months ago and it is far superior and a lot less bloated than lastpass.
Is there a way to increase the font in firefox? Maybe an addon? That is my only gripe with it. I know I can use Reader mode and even increase the font at the OS level but I would rather not do that.
No, other browsers on iOS are basically wrapping Safari. If you want ad blocking on iOS, you have to use an app that uses the content blocker API. My favorite is 1Blocker X, which seems to be pretty well reviewed as well.
As mentioned in another comment, iOS doesn't allow extensions. But Firefox Focus works quite well, and comes with a content (ad) blocker. Any content blocker you enable in Settings.app is used by all browsers.
uBlock Origin seems to have ~15 million active users between Chrome and Firefox (source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock_Origin). If it only spared us 10 seconds a day on average (probably a super conservative estimate), it would save the equivalent of an average human life (~70yrs) every 15 days!
(And given that probably at least 70% of users don't use an ad blocker, it's infuriating to think what's the "human" cost of ads on the web alone...)
uBlock saves my laptop battery and CPU when web browsing, by a lot. It has an older core2 CPU that can easily churn at 40% just staring at a page where some ads aren't blocked. That and the cpu fan spins up to high. Turn on uBlock, and CPU use goes to zero. uBlock saves electricity and is therefor good for the environment. I'd say we're all obligated to use it ;)
Try to watch a playlist on Youtube without a add blocker. Its insane the length and amount of commercials. A add blocker save you much more then 10 secs a day.
Which is also expensive. In Canada, it's 12$/m, but in includes original shows, YouTube Music, and a bunch of things I would never use. I would gladly pay a couple bucks a month to remove ads, but the fact that it's more expensive than it needs to be and includes so much more than I care about makes me not want to.
It's expensive when the alternative is free. Particularly since that free alternative is WAY better. Paying youtube only stops the ads on youtube. uBlock Origin does much much more than that. I'd sooner give gorhill 12/month, but he won't take my money.
This stuff adds up fast. $10/mo for YT Premium, $15/mo for Spotify, $15+/mo for Netflix. You are looking at almost $500 per year in subscription services alone, not even counting your phone bill.
There are definitely a few OSS that don't get anymore as much love as they deserve. VLC and OBS are two example of programs that are so damn good, even paid alternatives hardly can compete.
OBS is interesting because not only is it one of the best programs available for what it does (and cross platform to boot, which is huge), but it's also a catalyst for making people an absurd amount of money.
Pretty much every top streamer uses it. I wouldn't be surprised if OBS was responsible for generating over $75 million worth of earnings for just the top streamers on Twitch in the last few years, then there's Twitch's cut on top of it. That's going by 1 article saying just the top 10 streamers alone earned $20 million last year alone.
OBS is one of those products where I bet if they put up a Kickstarter asking for support they would end up raising a few million. Come to think of it now, I wonder if Twitch has tried to buy / fund OBS in the past.
OBS could make a lot of money by offering a few premium features for an annual donation. Something like a more advanced banner editor, or an animation engine.
It’s amazing software and I would like to see the developers and the organization thrive and be sustainable for the long term.
Honestly, streaming aside, before OBS there really wasn't any way to record your webcam except the shitty proprietary webcam application. Similarly, for screen recording, most people used Fraps or Taxi, both of which were very limited.
Maybe the lack of human resources is offset by the lack of managerial bottleneck (you can just get stuff done and solve problems immediately with your keyboard without the need for weekly meetings or approval from some non-caring boss)? I've always been astounded too.
The end of the book 'The PayPal Wars' gives fascinating context on how development just completely dies in a corporate environment. They went from being able to roll major new features in a weekend to requiring months just to schedule a meeting to discuss a font change. It's a fascinating read when we now look back at how PayPal just stagnated under Ebay's ownership.
I think twitter is a few thousand total employees, a fraction of that is engineers.
And a good chunk of it is maintaining & improving a large throughput backend system that is one of the top 10 in the world in terms of size and data volume.
And on top of that, an even smaller fraction is the people who think of and implement new front end things that you would interact with and think of the app changing. Like a lot of companies, it's probably a 10:1 ratio as far as backend:frontend people there are at the company.
As to why twitter changes so little, the company itself doesn't really understand why it's successful, so there is a lot of conservatism inside of it to not screw with the golden goose.
I'm not sure they are comparable.
One force of VLC is that it litteraly runs everywhere.
MPC-HC only works on windows, so it's not comparable. mpv has also a lot of target platforms, but not as much as VLC. It's really nice though, and I think a bit of competition is good.
VLC runs everywhere, but do you really need something that runs everywhere literally? Is this like the old hat trick of running Doom on your fridge? I'm content using mpc-hc on Windows and mpv on Linux/Mac. What else is there?
I was pretty die hard against VLC (i've moved everything I do to mpv wrappers once MPC-HC became abandonware) but I'd give vlc another chance if you haven't looked at it in a while. It's come a long way if your opinions were founded nearly a decade ago like mine were.
If I recall correctly, he trusted one of his maintainers too much, and that is the reason he no longer contributes to uBlock (his original project), but rather created uBlock origin.
The fact that there is no easy way to make this into a money project probably led to his relying so much on such a maintainer.
Part of the issue seems to be that the devs that actually value an OSS project don't have any way to persuade the company they work for to contribute to the project. If there was some way to be able to create a tier where a company would pay $12/month and be able to "something which benefits the company ?? bugfixes ??" - something support related or somehow, many of these projects (timezone, adblocker, ssh, even things like Matrix) could be funded.
I've disabled uMatrix for private windows, so it's just a regular right click -> "Open Link in Private Windows", done. uBlock still blocks the most obvious stuff, but the site is displayed "as intended".
The biggest and most important lists
(Easylist and its localizations) are heavily maintained by eyeo GmbH, the company behind AdBlock Plus. It might be a community project but in reality it's more like Chromium or Go.
Not really, no. The lists themselves are ultimately less interesting than the technology used to run them; there are other lists, and if easylist soured, a community-sourced alternative could be made relatively easily.
I actually doubt that. Finding the right rules is quite a bit of work and hobbyists will only look for such stuff for so long until they get bored. Programming can be fun but adding the nearly but not exactly the same rule to a filter list for the 2,000th time will eventually get tedious. Especially if you are playing a cat and mouse game and you are the (unpaid) cat and the mouse has quite strong incentives to get paid.
Doesn't that argument work for the plugin too. I mean most people using uBlock Origin probably started with Adblock (and maybe moved to ABP), or uBlock.
You can achieve similar results with pihole, or hosts file managers.
Back in the day I used a local proxy tool, Proximator or something.
AFAIK uBo isn't doing anything particular unique technologically (which doesn't mean I'm not grateful, nor that anyone could make it).
> You can achieve similar results with pihole, or hosts file managers.
You can't. uBO has contextual information for each network request, something not available to external content blocking solutions.
For example, many filters are meant to apply only on specific domains or whether they are 1st- or 3rd-party, and for this to work you need to know from which origin a network request is fired.
Also, uBO has an advanced-user mode that let you create rules to override filters in static filter lists; allows to work in default-deny mode; or even allows to work with no static filter lists at all. Contextual information is key to advanced-user mode features.
I use element filtering to strip Google News links off of the search page on the offhand chance I can't find something on DuckDuckGo and have to go back to it.
How would this make the uBlock Origin project like Chromium? The lists work and if the bigger lists choose not to block everything you'd like, you can simply enable additional lists. It's just a data source.
Okay, sure. I interpreted it as the OP referring to the extension itself since the grandparent post was primarily talking about being impressed with it being run by a single person.
Also keep in mind that the entire problem exists because it was created by thousands of people working in the advertising industry. It's frustrating how often people have to solve problems created by other people.
Just like how we have to have to spend billions cumulatively on computer security related products, because some people are trying to make a few million ransoming workstations and sending spam.
Is there a way to donate to the uBlock Origin project? If you want to imagine what the world would be like without uBlock, just try turning it off for a day. That's horrifying.
gorhill refuses out of principle to take donations. This is a passion project for him, and he wishes to maintain the freedom to stop working on it at any time without feeling "obligated" to continue.
There used to be a rich history of one-man products maintained selflessly by their creators, even up until the early 2010's. Entrepreneurship and business assholes destroyed that -- we gave this up when we made tech so easy to use that every brother and their mother got on board. Now tech is too big, with too much money, that it cannot help but attract sharks that buy up these sorts of things and then destroy them
Tech should just be for tech people! Mothers and brothers be damed!
I get the frustration, but shouldn’t we be working towards models that allow for better compensation for creators rather than ... well I’m not exactly sure what you’re advocating for here ...
Better compensation for creators is not going to stand up to a multi-million or multi-billion-dollar buyout. Much of the western world has this crazy fascination with tech for the sake of tech, and it is that fascination and subsequent vulnerability that attracts the personalities that have been systematically pillaging all the great things that tech -- particularly lone-wolf individuals -- have built over the years.
It'd be really cool to see more barriers to entry limiting people's ability to access some tech, and limiting the size of businesses that are built around it. The internet was much better when it belongs to and was embraced by nerds, and not the general public, for example.
Our modern world is too complicated for most folks and now we have to build things so overly simplified that it is nearly impossible to be a power user or do advanced tasks when everything is reduced to single-button, shitty-app solutions in the cloud maintained by megacorps with more money than God
Nah, he'd probably make enough to buy a few beers.
Maybe he could make $thousands per month spending serious time on self-marketing begging effort, but I wouldn't blame him if he wasn't interested in that
There are at least two revenue sources on uBlock Origin...
The software is free-to-use yes, but it doesn't mean that gorhill won't put money in his pockets.
Now there's also the list maintainers, who also work for free. Still makes you wonder about how the world works. There's probably many other similar instances. In any case, I think these people deserve more recognition than they currently do and we shouldn't take anything they do for granted.